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ON CREATIVE MEDIA PRACTICE AND THE TWITTER ECOLOGY By Jennifer Gutman

Jennifer Gutman is a PhD student in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice. Her work explores experiments in contemporary fiction and the anglophone novel, especially at their intersection with digital media. Specific research focuses include:

  • moments of media convergence and formal hybridity in experimental novels
  • narrative's role in facilitating attention and engagement in a "post-truth" culture (especially via new media platforms)
  • theories of the human in relation to decentering frameworks like the network and the Anthropocene

Final Project: "Twitter Ecology and the Stakes of Storytelling"

  • translating my research and writing about Twitter onto Twitter.
  • guided by the question: how are stories being told through this platform, and what do they have to tell us about the platform itself and the nature of digital experience?
  • attempt to understand better these story techniques by creating a Twitter "story" of my own
  • navigating between fiction and nonfiction, making academic work into a more accessible story by: 1) incorporating personal anecdote and reflection on my process and stakes as author; 2) finding ways to activate reader's engagement; 3) incorporating multi-media elements

My story explores:

  • connections between natural and digital media ecologies, looking back to the Internet's origins in the late 1960s and Stewart Brand's countercultural, proto-Internet magazine the Whole Earth Catalog.
  • recent theory on digital media that figures the network in terms of the elemental.
  • the pervasive social media ecologies of our time, like Twitter.

I ask:

Tracing media's ecological roots seems especially important in our current social and political moment:

  • recent theories of elemental media don't often consider the realities of our current ecological moment, which is characterized by increasingly volatile and unpredictable weather events resulting from disruptive human activity
  • media theory interested in questions of ecology don't account for nature's common gendered modifier (i.e.: Mother Earth) and gendered figurations of nature and wilderness (which have historically legitimized oppressive acts of "civilization")
  • Thus, my work focuses on stories by and about women that have emerged on digital platforms and seem to offer a unique perspective on the nature of these new media ecologies.
A tweet from Jennifer Egan's 2012 Twitter story "Black Box" about a cyborg "beauty" whose body is technologically augmented to record and store information while serving as an undercover government spy.

My Process

  • condensed an 8-page paper into a single page of approximately 300 words.
  • worked line by line within that document to begin drafting my tweets, using bullet points to mimic the tweet format.
  • some of the sentences within my original document inspired many tweets, while others were reproduced verbatim within my story.
  • collected images, gifs, and links to additional reading material in order to supplement my tweets and make the story as a whole more far-reaching and interactive.
one-page academic argument
Twitter translation in progress
images and gifs catalog to embed into tweets

Question of Form

  • my research questions animate a line of feminist and queer theory that challenges linear and normative models of writing and thought
  • but the context of Twitter raises an interesting paradox: If the power of feminist stories lies in defying existing narrative structures, wouldn’t telling a linear story within the disorienting fragmentation of social media do just that?
  • has linearity taken on new import during a time where maintaining attention and engagement has become severely challenged?
Tweets from Aziah "Zola" Wells's 2015 "Zola Story," which prepares the reader for a long (linear) story that will require sustained attention (and the story's viral success suggests it successfully facilitated that).

Impact on research:

  • challenged me in translating theoretically dense material into a more accessible, public-facing arena, which strengthened weak points in my own thinking
  • gave me ideas about possible avenues for archival research (WEC archives at Stanford University, Videofreex Archive at the Video Data Bank, Chicago)
  • heightened my interest around the history of DIY activism spawned from early digital media culture (and its contrast with the current atmosphere of surveillance and propaganda)
  • heightened my interest in the effect of public engagement on the evolution of my work and the value of being active within the mediums that are the focus of your own research.
Videofreex. The Spaghetti City Video Manual (Praeger, 1973).

Reservations

  • should I make my research widely accessible before I've had a chance to publish it in a scholarly context?
  • should I be more protective of these ideas in their early stages?
  • how to appropriately field criticism and negative feedback if my story invites it?

Hopes

  • helps me to develop my critical work on these topics further
  • engages an audience that's plugged into the very network I'm analyzing
  • unearths new ideas and challenges my own thinking
  • reaches and connects with like-minded academics as well as engages non-academics who might not otherwise read my work

Twitter story excerpts below (and you can read further at this link: https://twitter.com/tweetcology)